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The 1920s and 1930s saw a significant amount of work devoted to regional sciences; but it was theoretical in nature, or, where practical, concentrated more in the eastern region of the United States. For example, a great deal of theoretical work on American regionalism drew upon Vidal de la Blanche, Jean Brunhes, and Patrick Geddes, all of whom saw the geographic region as the “intersection of culture, social institutions, technology, and physical environment.”5 Most notable among this work was that of Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye, who promoted the “use of the natural region as a basis for planning.”6 It was Mumford who was behind the Regional Plan Association of America (1923-1924), which, in the opinion of Kirkpatrick Sale, "established itself as perhaps the most inventive and far reaching regional organization - and in many respects the most original planning organization - this country has ever seen."7
Even the government was involved. A central document of the National Resources Planning Committee suggested as early as 1935 that:
Regional differentiation … may turn out to be the true expression of American life and culture … [reflecting] American ideals, needs, and viewpoints far more adequately than does State consciousness and loyalty. One might conclude, therefore, that it should not only be conserved but augmented and utilized as a major factor in national planning and development … Development, in reality the whole of government, emerges not from State and regional attitudes and desires, but very importantly also from needs and purposes which can only be described as “regional,” from “regional consciousness,” and “regional climates of opinion” … The problems to be treated do not follow State lines but resolve themselves into regional units, and hence do not often lend themselves to treatment by existing political arrangements.8
It remains ironic, despite early attempts to establish the region as the basic planning framework, it is still the case regional planning remains “one of the most important, and still unfinished, chapters in American planning history."9
So, why has regional planning not gained more traction? It appears what happened was “from the 1930s onward, research became more systematic; it progressed from sectoral analyses–agriculture, industry, trade, tertiary activities in general–to the general schema of the spatial balance of the system.”10 Whereas regional science up through the early twentieth century was controlled primarily by geographers and cultural historians, “from the 1950s onward, the economists and political scientists ventured to define the concept of the region and to make it operational.”11
During the 1950s and 1960s the greatest advances were made in the field of meso- and macro-economics, which required not only that the geometries of space would be defined but that certain imperatives be met regarding location. The object, according to G.B. Benko, was “to identify the region where a particular industry could produce and distribute its product at the lowest costs; so as to justify the establishment of that industry in the area.”12 This trend reflected the larger trend toward more quantitative analysis in other disciplines. The 1950s was, for example, a time when many political theorists worried about the “rationalization of politics,”13 where a "technique of the book" was learned in graduate school by the newly trained professional administrator and applied to a set of political endeavors meant to usher in the new society of longitudinal studies and social engineering.
It is not surprising, because these studies could not account for such noneconomic factors as culture, the highly scientific approach was open to Marxist criticisms, first brought forth in France, Italy, and Latin America during the 1950s and 1960s and later in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1970s. Blending theoretical accounts involving questions concerning space, social justice, and equality with practical